


They never tell you about the loneliness

by Skairunner



Category: Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Isolation, POV Second Person, lonely
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-18
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:14:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26534935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skairunner/pseuds/Skairunner
Summary: You're dropped into a different world, and work to avoid the terror of the night. But there's something more that you desperately crave.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 22





	They never tell you about the loneliness

Boredom and terror, boredom and terror. You flip through the two in quick succession like turning a page in grade school, the little drawing at the corner animating horror. That was your first few days in this world, desolate and empty during the day, crawling with hungry arachnids and things that shouldn't have been able to move, let alone want to kill you by night. You sketch in the time with tasks, things to achieve -- a stone axe like you're a main character in the Neolithic, a hut to hide in when the denizens of the night rattle your prison bars. Is their groans agony or something worse? Do they rattle their bones like a chittering cat? Are they hunting you out of instinct or out of sport?

You coax verdant life from nothingness, lines in the dirt becoming soft green shoots becoming the welcoming yellow of harvest-to-come. You persuade the animal life to live a little closer to you, putting the little sheep on leads and tugging them along. The taste of raw milk is like nothing you've had before, so real that the cartoned version has to be but a shadow on a cave. You kill a chicken for the first time, awkward slashes and blood everywhere, but it's a little easier on the next. 

Rain drums your hut's roof, like the hands drum your doors, as you warm yourself by furnace light sitting on your bed, clutching a stick and daring not to make any noise. Fitful sleep is your reward at the end of the day.

You keep yourself occupied. There's a sunken ship on the horizon -- fish salted so much that it's less flesh and more a concept preserved in brine, ingots of metal hinting civilization in a way that's irresistable. You fashion that hope into an axe and get to work.

It's night. It was just a wonder before, but now you feel like: *there has to be someone out there*. There has to be *someone* out there. There *has* to be someone out there. The nightly mirror-twisted serenade doesn't bother you as much now.

\---

You find civilization -- of a sort. People -- of a kind. They don't seem to really speak, but they're intelligent. Green flashes switch hands along with a commensurate amount of baked bread. It's not what you'd hoped for, but it keeps that flame going.

\---

You get used to the night. It isn't a terror as much anymore, but just your lifestyle. Opportunity. The ancient weather-worn bones feed your crops. The rotten flesh goes to the pigs. You shield your eyes as the square sun rises yet again. Too many times for it to be a dream -- Zhuang Zhou clearly got over his butterfly delusion from the fact that mundane life continued hundredfold more than the liberation of the lepidoptera form. You haven't found anyone else out there, not like you. The villagers clearly weren't like you. The skeletons were, but they were long-dead. The zombies. Once, you saw a fort piercing the horizon -- but inside were more of the villagers, except emo-goth and bloodthirsty. The longest trip you took, a week's journey out and back following the red needle of a compass, revealed nothing but more of the same. Hills, mountains, rivers, beaches. No-one else like you. 

\---

They don't tell you about the loneliness.

No, that was a lie. Robin Crusoe was almost driven insane, until he found Friday. The wayward cosmonaut who was left on Mars could send bits and bytes across the air, thousands and thousands of kilometers home to his kin. If humanity was even a fraction of the distance away, there's a good chance that you'll never find them. Ever.

You haven't spoken to anyone in months, only to your animals who never talk back, the villagers who communicate with gestures and grunts, the cat who purrs on your lap contently in front of the fireplace. What is it like to communicate with someone who isn't just yourself wearing a mask? It's getting harder to remember, but for an emptiness inside you, a craving. You need someone.

\---

It's getting to you. No, not the creepy-crawlies, the tall thin men who scream hell and high heaven as they try to batter you back into the dust from whence you came. No, you have them figured out, parceled out and packed away -- sometimes literally, in the form of stacks of bone or bowls of the strange green pearls the Men drop. No, it's what's been nagging at you ever since the first day, gnawing on your heart as you carved your mark onto the dirt, as you distract yourself from everything but the daily experience of living.

You need it. You need it or you need to try and find it or you will truly go crazy. It presses on you like a physical thing, a guillotine over your head, a Chinese fingertrap that squeezes you more the harder you struggle. Safety isn't enough. A home -- no, a house is nothing but a shell to protect your body. But there's more to life than that.

The horizon beckons, the rising smoke from the village morphing into a signal beacon. Come and find, it says, skipping the last word. Find. 

You pack carefully. You know what you need to survive, the tools you prefer to get yourself out of any spot. The urge is within you. Now you're the sheep tied to a lead, and the hand that's tugging you is firm. There's no slack. You pack dried jerky, bring a cat and dog, and close the door upon one life, then step into another.


End file.
